But his location was mostly irrelevant, as he only pinned two and a
half paragraphs from what happened in court on Monday to the end of his
report. Most of the story was a recap of the trial's "grisly details,"
accusations from "conservatives" that the media was ignoring the story,
and defenses from unlabeled liberal media "experts" denying a coverup.

Through
four weeks, prosecutors have laid out evidence against Dr. Kermit
Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion provider on trial on charges of killing
seven viable fetuses by âsnippingâ their necks with scissors and of
causing the death of a pregnant 41-year-old woman during a procedure.

The
grisly details drew mainly local attention. But after an online furor
that the case was being ignored by the national news media because of
troubling accounts of late-term abortions, reporters from major
newspapers and television networks descended Monday on the Court of
Common Pleas. It was the latest example of the power of social media to
drive a wide debate, similar to the attention paid to a rape trial last
month in Steubenville, Ohio, that resulted in the conviction of two
teenage football players.

On
Twitter, conservatives began a campaign to prod more coverage. Mollie
Hemingway, a columnist for Christianity Today, asked individual health
journalists directly why they were ignoring the story.

Gabriel managed to indentify the Washington Times as conservative, but not the suddenly high-profile, controversial left-wing magazine Mother Jones
as liberal, or anyone else who rushed to the media's defense. The word
"liberal" didn't appear in a story that somehow avoided stating the
obvious conservative explanation for the media ignoring the story:
Liberal bias.

But others noted
there had been scant coverage in conservative news outlets. Kevin Drum,
a political blogger for Mother Jones, pointed out that one conservative
paper, The Washington Times, had published one wire-service article
about the trial and seven stories âcomplaining that other media outlets
arenât covering the trial.â

Kelly
McBride, an expert on media ethics at the Poynter Institute, said she
saw no evidence of any cover-up, simply confusion by news editors over
whether the story merited national attention. âOne of the ways the news
media knows how to cover a story these days is because of the attention
in social media,â Ms. McBride said. âThatâs how people judge whether
thereâs an appetite for a story.â

Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post,
told a reporter from his paper writing about the controversy that he
simply had not known of the story until readers e-mailed him last week.
âI wish I could be conscious of all stories everywhere, but I canât be,â
he said. âWe never decide what to cover for ideological reasons, no
matter what critics might claim.â

Baron's ignorance argument is a
damning indictment of the liberal media's information bubble, although
Gabriel doesn't seem to recognize it. Gabriel was quoting from an
unconvincing rationalization for the lack of coverage by Paul Farhi from
Monday's Post.

If Gabriel had wanted a more questioning view, he could have read Melinda Henneberger's online analysis for the Post,
"Why Kermit Gosnell hasnât been on Page One": "I say we didnât write
more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news
pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights. In
fact, that is so fixed a view of what constitutes coverage of that
issue that itâs genuinely hard, I think, for many journalists to see a
story outside that paradigm as news. Thatâs not so much a conscious
decision as a reflex, but the effect is one-sided coverage."

Gabriel
noted that "In any event, the coverage has arrived," as if that ended
the discussion. After all the throat-clearing, Gabriel finally issued a
brief recount of what actually happened in Monday's
courtroom, with a slant toward Gosnell's defense.

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